No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
From Elegy to Climate Bildungsroman: Jenni Fagan's The Sunlight Pilgrims
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 April 2025
Abstract
Climate-change discourse is suffused with a profound sense of loss, amid accelerating ecological degradation. While some ecocritics consider the elegy an apt means of narrativizing these losses, others call for genres capable of moving beyond mourning. I argue that the Bildungsroman—which typically depicts a protagonist who undergoes a transformational journey following crisis and eventually comes to terms with the world—may narrativize the process of moving beyond climate grief and adapting to a changed world. I indicate a corpus of novels that may be termed “climate Bildungsromane,” which envision various transformations following climate grief. Through an analysis of one significant example, Jenni Fagan's The Sunlight Pilgrims, I explore climate Bildungsromane's tendency to narrate the journey from ecocatastrophe to adaptation through a fusion of modern scientific rationality with forms of belief and storytelling commonly considered premodern. I contemplate how and why this seeming paradox surfaces across cultural imaginings of journeys beyond climate grief.
Information
- Type
- Essay
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Modern Language Association of America
References
Works Cited
Agarwal, Bina. “The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India.” Feminist Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 1992, pp. 119–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Albrecht, Glenn. “‘Solastalgia’: A New Concept in Health and Identity.” PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature, no. 3, 2005, pp. 41–55.Google Scholar
Alexander, Travis, and Campana, Joseph, respondents. “Elegy, Ecology, Emergency.” MLA Annual Convention, 6 Jan. 2022, online.Google Scholar
Andersen, Gregers. Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis: A New Perspective on Life in the Anthropocene. Routledge, 2020. Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media.Google Scholar
Armitstead, Claire. “Jenni Fagan: ‘I Understand Crisis. I Grew Up in a Very, Very Extreme Way.’” The Guardian, 14 Jan. 2021, www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/09/jenni-fagan-i-understand-crisis-i-grew-up-in-a-very-very-extreme-way.Google Scholar
Barzilai, Shuli. “‘Tell My Story’: Remembrance and Revenge in Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Shakespeare's Hamlet.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 50, no. 1, fall 2008, pp. 87–110.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, Jean. “Modernity.” Translated by David James Miller. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, vol. 11, no. 3, 1987, pp. 63–72.Google Scholar
Beyer, Robert M., et al. “Shifts in Global Bat Diversity Suggest a Possible Role of Climate Change in the Emergence of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2.” Science of the Total Environment, vol. 767, 2021, article no. 145413.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Biehl, Janet. Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics. Black Rose Books, 1991.Google Scholar
Boers, Niklas. “Observation-Based Early-Warning Signals for a Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.” Nature Climate Change, vol. 11, no. 8, Aug. 2021, pp. 680–88.Google Scholar
Branch, Michael P. “Are You Serious? A Modest Proposal for Environmental Humor.” The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Garrard, Greg, Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 377–90.Google Scholar
Buckley, Jerome Hamilton. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Harvard UP, 1974.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. U of Chicago P, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. U of Chicago P, 2002.Google Scholar
“Coatlicue.” Britannica Academic, www.britannica.com/topic/Coatlicue. Accessed 24 Oct. 2021.Google Scholar
“Coping with Climate Change Distress.” Australian Psychological Society, psychology.org.au/for-the-public/psychology-topics/climate-change-psychology/coping-with-climate-change-distress. Accessed 3 Jan. 2023.Google Scholar
Crutzen, Paul J. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature, vol. 415, no. 6867, 2002, p. 23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cunsolo, Ashlee. “She Was Bereft.” Prologue. Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, edited by Cunsolo and Landman, Karen, McGill-Queen's UP, 2017, pp. viii–xxii.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Kathleen. Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time. U of Pennsylvania P, 2008. The Middle Ages Series.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Di Chiro, Giovanna. “Welcome to the White (M)Anthropocene? A Feminist-Environmentalist Critique.” MacGregor, Routledge Handbook, pp. 487–505.Google Scholar
Ditlevsen, Peter, and Ditlevsen, Susanne. “Warning of a Forthcoming Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.” Nature Communications, vol. 14, 2023, article no. 4254.Google Scholar
Eisenstadt, S. N. “Multiple Modernities.” Daedalus, vol. 129, no. 1, winter 2000, pp. 1–29.Google Scholar
Erb, Cynthia. “A Spiritual Blockbuster: Avatar, Environmentalism, and the New Religions.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 66, no. 3, fall 2014, pp. 3–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Esty, Jed. Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development. Oxford UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Evans, Kristen. “Looking for Light in Darkness: A Q and A with Jenni Fagan.” Brooklyn Magazine, 12 Oct. 2016, www.bkmag.com/2016/10/12/looking-light-darkness-qa-jenni-fagan-sunlight-pilgrims-the-panopticon/.Google Scholar
“Extinction.” National Geographic Society, 7 June 2019, education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/extinction/.Google Scholar
Feder, Helena. Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture: Biology and the Bildungsroman. Ashgate Publishing, 2014.Google Scholar
Furuhata, Yuriko. “Weathering with You: Mythical Time and the Paradox of the Anthropocene.” Representations, vol. 157, no. 1, 2022, pp. 68–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gahman, Levi. Land, God, and Guns: Settler Colonialism and Masculinity in the American Heartland. Zed Books, 2020.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garavelli, Dani. “We're All Doomed.” Scottish Review of Books, 21 Mar. 2016, www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/2016/03/we-re-all-doomed/.Google Scholar
Germond-Duret, Celine. “Tradition and Modernity: An Obsolete Dichotomy? Binary Thinking, Indigenous Peoples and Normalisation.” Third World Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 9, 2016, pp. 1537–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. U of Chicago P, 2016.Google Scholar
Ghosh, Amitav. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. U of Chicago P, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hacke, Melanie. “Uprooted by Modernity: George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss as an Ecological Antibildungsroman.” Orbis Litterarum, vol. 74, no. 2, Apr. 2019, pp. 116–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardin, James N. Introduction. Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, edited by Hardin, U of South Carolina P, 1991, pp. ix–xxvii.Google Scholar
Harper, Tyler Austin. The Specter of Extinction: Environmental Nihilism in British Science Fiction (1800–1945). 2020. New York U, PhD dissertation.Google Scholar
Harris-Fain, Darren. “Dangerous Visions: New Wave and Post–New Wave Science Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, edited by Link, Eric Carl and Canavan, Gerry, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 31–43.Google Scholar
Heelas, Paul. “The New Age in Cultural Context: The Premodern, the Modern and the Postmodern.” Religion, vol. 23, no. 2, 1993, pp. 103–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. U of Chicago P, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hinde, Dominic. “Jenni Fagan on The Sunlight Pilgrims.” The Skinny, 24 Mar. 2016, www.theskinny.co.uk/books/features/sunlight-pilgrims.Google Scholar
Hinde, Dominic. “Something Super-Wicked This Way Comes: Genre, Emergency, Expectation, and Learning to Die in Climate-Change Scotland.” Humanities, vol. 9, no. 1, 2020, article no. 17.Google Scholar
Horton, Zach. “The Trans-Scalar Challenge of Ecology.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 26, no. 1, winter 2019, pp. 5–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huebert, David. “Eating and Mourning the Corpse of the World: Ecological Cannibalism and Elegiac Protomourning in Cormac McCarthy's The Road.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, vol. 15, no. 1, 2017, pp. 66–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hultman, Martin. “Exploring Industrial, Ecomodern, and Ecological Masculinities.” MacGregor, Routledge Handbook, pp. 239–52.Google Scholar
Johns-Putra, Adeline. Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge UP, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johns-Putra, Adeline. “Ecocriticism, Genre, and Climate Change: Reading the Utopian Vision of Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the Capital Trilogy.” English Studies, vol. 91, no. 7, Nov. 2010, pp. 744–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Katz, Marion. “The Neglected History of Furū’ and the Premodern/Modern Binary.” Journal of Islamic Law, vol. 2, no. 1, spring 2021, pp. 217–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kellner, Douglas. “Jean Baudrillard.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 18 Dec. 2019, plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/.Google Scholar
Kerridge, Richard. “Ecocritical Approaches to Literary Form and Genre: Urgency, Depth, Provisionality, Temporality.” The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Garrard, Greg, Oxford UP, 2014, pp. 361–76.Google Scholar
Koenig-Woodyard, Chris. “The Bone Clocks and the Mud of Humanity: The Anthropocene Bildungsroman.” David Mitchell: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, edited by Knepper, Wendy and Hopf, Courtney, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 149–64.Google Scholar
Lampert, Jo. “Coming of Age in 9/11 Fiction: Bildungsroman and Loss of Innocence.” The War of My Generation: Youth Culture and the War on Terror, edited by Kieran, David, Rutgers UP, 2015, pp. 171–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lehman, Joel, and Miikkulainen, Risto. “Extinction Events Can Accelerate Evolution.” PLoS One, vol. 10, no. 8, 2015, article no. e0132886.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy. 1984. Routledge, 2004.Google Scholar
Logan, Kirsty. “The Sunlight Pilgrims and The Dead Queen of Bohemia by Jenni Fagan—Review.” The Guardian, 22 Apr. 2016, www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/22/the-sunlight-pilgrims-novel-the-dead-queen-of-bohemia-poetry-jenni-fagan-review.Google Scholar
MacGregor, Sherilyn. “Gender and Environment.” Introduction. MacGregor, Routledge Handbook, pp. 1–24.Google Scholar
MacGregor, Sherilyn, editor. Routledge Handbook of Gender and Environment. Routledge, 2017.Google Scholar
Mahajan, Nandita. “Reading Climate Change in the Palimpsest: The Ecocritical Potential of Novel-to-Film Adaptation.” Adaptation, vol. 14, no. 2, Aug. 2021, pp. 243–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mallett, Shelley. “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature.” The Sociological Review, vol. 52, no. 1, 2004, pp. 62–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martinez, Michelle. Review of The Sunlight Pilgrims, by Jenni Fagan. New York Journal of Books, www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/sunlight-pilgrims. Accessed 2 Jan. 2023.Google Scholar
Martini, Fritz. “Bildungsroman—Term and Theory.” Translated by Baldwin, Claire and Hardin, James. Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, edited by Hardin, U of South Carolina P, 1991, pp. 1–25.Google Scholar
Mayer, Sylvia. “Science in the World Risk Society: Risk, the Novel, and Global Climate Change.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 64, no. 2, 2016, pp. 207–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McFarland, Sarah E. Ecocollapse Fiction and Cultures of Human Extinction. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. 1980. Harper and Row Publishers, 1990.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Alex. “‘Be Very Worried’: Gulf Stream Collapse Could Spark Global Chaos by 2025.” New York Post, 27 July 2023, nypost.com/2023/07/27/gulf-stream-collapse-could-spark -global-chaos-in-2-years/.Google Scholar
Moore, Jason W., editor. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Kairos, 2016.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. Verso, 1987.Google Scholar
Morrison, Ken. Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations of Modern Social Thought. 1995. 2nd ed., Sage Publications, 2006.Google Scholar
Newby, Jonica. Beyond Climate Grief: A Journey of Love, Snow, Fire and an Enchanted Beer Can. NewSouth, 2021.Google Scholar
Partridge, Christopher, editor. New Religions, a Guide: New Religious Movements, Sects, and Alternative Spiritualities. Oxford UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Porsanger, Jelena. “The Problematisation of the Dichotomy of Modernity and Tradition in Indigenous and Sami Contexts.” Working with Traditional Knowledge: Communities, Institutions, Information Systems, Law and Ethics, edited by Porsanger, Gunvor Guttorm, , Sámi Allaskuvla, 2011, pp. 225–46.Google Scholar
Pulé, Paul M. “Burning (and Drowning) in a Hell of Our Own Making.” Pulé and Hultman, pp. 3–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pulé, Paul M., and Hultman, Martin, editors. Men, Masculinities, and Earth: Contending with the (M)Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology.Google Scholar
Ramgotra, Manjeet. “Time, Modernity and Space: Montesquieu's and Constant's Ancient/Modern Binaries.” History of European Ideas, vol. 48, no. 3, 2022, pp. 263–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raworth, Kate. “Must the Anthropocene Be a Manthropocene?” The Guardian, 20 Oct. 2014, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/20/anthropocene-working-group-science-gender-bias.Google Scholar
Rigby, Stephen H. Review of Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time, by Kathleen Davis. Speculum, vol. 86, no. 1, Jan. 2011, pp. 178–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenthal, Debra J. “Climate-Change Fiction and Poverty Studies: Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, Diaz's ‘Monstro,’ and Bacigalupi's ‘The Tamarisk Hunter.’” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 27, no. 2, spring 2020, pp. 268–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sandilands, Catriona. The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy. U of Minnesota P, 1999.Google Scholar
Schmidt, Volker H. “Multiple Modernities or Varieties of Modernity?” Current Sociology, vol. 54, no. 1, Jan. 2006, pp. 77–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scholes, Robert. Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future. U of Notre Dame P, 1975.Google Scholar
Seager, Joni. “Rachel Carson Was Right—Then, and Now.” MacGregor, Routledge Handbook, pp. 27–42.Google Scholar
Seymour, Nicole. “Transgender Environments.” MacGregor, Routledge Handbook, pp. 253–69.Google Scholar
Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Stewart, Alan E. Review of Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, edited by Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman. Ethics and the Environment, vol. 23, no. 1, 2018, pp. 79–86.Google Scholar
Taylor, Steve. “Transformation through Loss and Grief: A Study of Personal Transformation following Bereavement.” The Humanistic Psychologist, vol. 49, no. 3, 2021, pp. 381–99.Google Scholar
Tedeschi, Richard G., and Calhoun, Lawrence G.. Trauma and Transformation: Growing in the Aftermath of Suffering. Sage Publications, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Charis, and MacGregor, Sherilyn. “The Death of Nature: Foundations of Ecological Feminist Thought.” MacGregor, Routledge Handbook, pp. 43–53.Google Scholar
Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. U of Virginia P, 2015.Google Scholar
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. 1974. Morningside ed., Columbia UP, 1990.Google Scholar
Wada, Kaori, and Park, Jeeseon. “Integrating Buddhist Psychology into Grief Counseling.” Death Studies, vol. 33, no. 7, 2009, pp. 657–83.Google ScholarPubMed